St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Your Tech Weblog

St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Your Tech Today: An Android you can use with one hand

You may have noticed how smartphones are getting bigger and bigger. They’re very thin but their horizontal and vertical dimensions are growing.

This makes for lovely-looking hardware – Samsung’s Galaxy S III, available from all the major U.S. carriers, is the best example of that to date.

But it also makes the phones harder to use, especially if you want to manipulate them one-handed with a thumb.

That is a cinch with my 3.7-inch iPhone 4 and the physically near-identical iPhone 4S, with its relatively modest vertical and horizontal dimensions, but more difficult with the Galaxy S III or AT&T’s HTC One X. It’s impossible with mega-phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note.

So I’ve been a bit enamored with the HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE, a Verizon handset, with a 4-inch screen that can be used one-handed with ease. It’s marginally wider and a bit taller than the iPhone, but neither is an issue.

It’s not a perfect phone. It’s much thicker than the iPhone, for starters, though its rounded and textured back fits nicely in the palm of my hand. Its overall design is looking a bit dated. Its screen looks terrific but is not a full HD display. And its internal specs lag behind superphones like the One X.

Y’know what? I don’t care. It feels plenty fast for everyday use, has a pretty nice 8-megapixel camera, builds in blazing 4G LTE data access, and, to the point of this post, is a cinch to pull out of a pocket and control with my thumb. That is a big deal.

This phone has the newfangled wireless technology called Near Field Communication, which will let folks pay for stuff in stores with the tap of their phones against a credit-card terminal. But, oddly, it can’t run Google Wallet, an app for facilitating such NFC purchases at places like CVS pharmacies and BP gas stations. I hope that changes.

So, while the HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE isn’t perfect, it’s probably the phone I’d buy if I had to buy an Android phone right now. On balance, it’s close to perfect for me.